Kevin Kwan Quotes

I do not understand how on earth you can become a writer without seeing the world.

Sometimes, I get ideas from dreams. Often, my stories are based on adventures that I, or my friends, have actually lived.

I wrote one called 'The No Hotel.' I got inspired in 1989 while I was on a trip down to Brazil, and I didn't finish it until eight years later.

Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into undiscovered land.

It’s not just the adage ‘write what you know,’ it’s about gathering up all of the knowledge and experience you’ve collected up to now to help you dive into the things you don’t know.

The old adage is, 'Write what you know.' But if you only do that, your work becomes claustrophobic. I say, 'Write what you want to know.'

What I like about writing a stand alone novel is you're starting with a fresh world and fresh characters. Part of what I love about writing is that journey of discovery where it's all new to me as well.

I did some traveling as an amateur and always loved the different places I saw.

I like to write in a shroud of secrecy because I have to keep finding ways to scare myself.

In every novel, I write about something - a place, an experience, an emotion - with which I'm intimately familiar, but it's also crucial to me that I take on challenges. If write only inside my comfort zone, I'll suffocate.

I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.

I'm always saying that my books are not autobiographical because they're not. I can't choose any one scene and say, 'Oh, this is exactly what happened to me!' I just use little snippets of things as a starting point!

For me, my travels have been the chance to go to a place that already exists in my imagination.

I can create countries just as I can create the actions of my characters. That is why a lot of travel seems to me a waste of time.

Everything I write comes from my childhood in one way or another. I am forever drawing on the sense of mystery and wonder and possibility that pervaded that time of my life.

I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.

Nothing much interested me other than playing with language and telling stories and doing something with the wonders of the world around me.

People can't see that if I had not been a poet, I could never have had such success as a traveler.

Writing an essay is like a school assignment: I have my topic, I organize my thoughts, and I write it. I have complete control over what I'm doing. Writing a novel is like setting out on a journey without knowing who or what I'll encounter, how long it's going to take, or where I'm going to end up.

I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.

I was born to travel and write verse.

My books come to me in images, and sometimes the image is at the beginning of the book, and sometimes it's simply a flash somewhere in the middle.

As long as there are things to wonder about, there are stories to be written about them. That makes me happy, because writing about things seems to be my thing.

Over the years, I've traveled to many places for inspiration and research, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, South Carolina, California, and Hawaii.